TECHNICAL COMPUTING CAMP 2019

The 6th Technical Computing Camp was again held in the already well-known environment of the Fountain Hotel on the Brno Dam. We did not change the format of this meeting of users and fans of technical calculations and simulations, during two days the participants completed the following program:

At this year's Camp, MathWorks was represented by Mr. Alessandro Tarchini, who delivered an engaging lecture on the development of finite automaton modeling and introduced a hot new product for 2019 – using the Stateflow program to design the control logic of applications created directly in MATLAB (without the need to use Simulink) and in the App Designer application.

Colleagues Jaroslav Jirkovský, Michal Blaho and Jan Studnička introduced the most important innovations in the development of the MATLAB / Simulink system and demonstrated its use in new application areas – Predictive Maintenance, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning and Sensor Fusion.

Martin Kožíšek at TCC introduced the latest innovation in COMSOL Multiphysics – COMSOL Compiler. Compiler allows to create separately executable applications in which their authors can make work with a particular simulation model available to others.

The new features in the dSPACE offer were introduced by Jana Sárená – in particular the compact Scalexio Autobox system and a new range of FPGA cards.

Martina Mudrová briefly described the current possibilities of licensing the MATLAB system, from cheap licences for home use to standard company licences and large university-wide licences, which comfortably cover all the needs for teaching and research at universities. In addition to changing the name of these licences (from the original name TAH to the current „Campus-Wide License“) there has been a substantial and pleasant change in these licences – schools that use powerful computing resources (supercomputers, computing clusters, GPU means) now do not have to acquire separately the licence of the MATLAB Parallel Server product, this product is part of the university-wide licence. I am pleased to say that the new university-wide licensing model is successfully developing in the Czech Republic as well – at the time of writing these lines, 10 universities in the Czech Republic and Slovakia are already using it.

The lectures of our users were met with great interest of the audience:

- Prof. Igor Podlubný from TU Košice introduced the participants to the use of the MATLAB program for teaching and research at his university. At TU Košice, the use of online courses became a standard during the first years of the Campus-Wide license, the school has managed to increase students' interest in mathematics. To popularize the research results, the university successfully uses all the means offered by the MATLAB Central portal.

- Mr. Robert Grepl of Mechsoft presented a framework for creating complex AI applications that makes it easier for the „typical“ MATLAB user (who is not usually a programmer) to design and implement advanced and professionally executed applications. In creating this framework, Mechsoft used both a deep knowledge of how MATLAB works and its openness to the use of other programming languages (Java).

- Mr.Petr Kolář from the Institute of Geophysics of the CAS presented his work on the identification of acoustic emission phenomena in geophysics using convolutional neural networks. We were pleased that he gained inspiration for solving the problem at one of the previous TCC meetings. It was also interesting to see how quickly the new functions of the Deep Learning Toolbox can be applied in practice.

- Mr.Martin Šiler from the Institute of Instrument Technology of the CAS introduced a client-server application in a very engaging form, which serves for the use of MATLAB as a powerful computational server for a system for deep tissue imaging. The use of thin optical fibres requires a computationally complex transformation in the reconstruction of the original image, so the system for scanning the image from a miniature endoscope needs to be connected with a powerful computational system.

In his workshop, Matouš Lorenc addressed the issue of heating biological tissue due to exposure to high-frequency electromagnetic radiation. This issue concerns all of us thanks to the use of mobile devices. In the COMSOL Multiphysics program, RF Module and Heat Transfer Module with Bioheat Transfer interface are available to solve such tasks.

Thursday's part of the official programme ended with Jan Studnička discussing Tips and Tricks for MATLAB, which stretched well beyond the originally planned time for a group of interested parties.

The fine weather of late summer allowed us to spend a pleasant evening on the terrace of a local restaurant.

On Friday morning, we started with a warm-up quiz, followed by the main part of Friday's program – a competition for the best user project. Eight entries competed for the participants' interest, after a short presentation of their work, the contestants had about an hour to discuss at their tables.

The results of the competition were announced by a jury led by prof. Petr Dostál from VUT. This year the winner was the home team from the mechatronic laboratory of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of VUT represented by Mr. Vojtěch Mlynář. In this laboratory they developed an open modular teaching kit based on the Arduino platform, which is able to use sensors and motors of the Lego NXT kit.

The list of projects, their description and the complete results of the competition can be found in the Competition section.

In parallel with the competition, the application engineers of Humusoft prepared a non-competitive show of their own projects, their description can be found here.

The contestants and my colleagues spent the whole morning at the tables with their examples in lively discussions with other participants, which confirms me that this „fair“ part of TCC is very interesting, we will continue to do so.

I would like to invite you who work with our tools to participate in next year's contest! The contest is open to all users of MATLAB, COMSOL Multiphysics or dSPACE systems, whether they use them in the corporate sphere, in the studio or at home.

At the end of the camp, after lunch, we again included the Creative Workshop, where you could sit down at the computers and under our guidance try out solutions for several prepared tasks.

Thank you to the speakers, contestants and all other participants for their contribution to the success of the event and I look forward to meeting you again!

Please enter the date of next year's Technical Computing Camp in your calendars: September 10–11, 2020!